During its Global SSD Summit, Samsung today announced the 950 Pro series SSDs which are the first Samsung consumer SSDs with a PCI-Express interface. Samsung promises a performance increase of up to 4x compared to SATA-3 based SSDs.

Read the full article here: [http://www.myce.com/news/samsung-announces-950-pro-ssds-4x-performance-of-current-ssds-77375/](http://www.myce.com/news/samsung-announces-950-pro-ssds-4x-performance-of-current-ssds-77375/)
Please note that the reactions from the complete site will be synched below.

Good to see that the TBW has increased significantly over the 850 Evo models - 200 for the 256GB model & 400 for the 512GB (IIRC the 850 was 75 & 150). By my calculations, over the 5 year warranty that equates to 0.44 total drive writes per day. (The 256 & 512GB 850 Evo work out at 0.16, half that for the 120GB & 1TB and a mere 0.04 for the 2TB.)

75 Terrabytes sounds like a lot, but it soon adds up. I find I am increasingly reluctant to use my 3 month-old 256GB mSATA 850 Evo for write intensive tasks and no longer feel I can habitually hibernate, something I have become increasingly reliant on.

On the downside, despite Samsung’s boast of “unmatched performance”, specified power consumption has increased significantly compared to the (SATA) 850 Evo M.2 512GB:

I hope to have a review sample of this SSD in the not to distant future.
Regarding power consumption. I noticed a trend when I conducted the power testing article, that the more grunt an SSD had, the more power it consumed. This is pretty much as expected. To generate 300K IOPS requires a fair amount of processing power from the SSD controller. which generally means it will consume more power.

I also predicted in the article that once ‘the real’ consumer grade NVMe SSDs appeared they were likely to have lower power requirements than the mega powerful Intel 750 and the OCZ REVODrive 350. If these figures from Samsung for the 950 PRO are accurate, and I have no reason to doubt that they are not. Then the power requirements are indeed lower when compared to the Intel and OCZ drives.

There is also likely to be an 950 EVO version later, which I’d expect to have even lower power requirements than the 950 PRO.

One thing seems sure. PCIe NVMe SSD’s are about to become very popular for consumers, and they are almost certainly going to be much faster than any SATA SSD.

12Gbit Serial Attached SCSI has significantly greater power requirements than the earlier, slower versions. And the proposed 12Gbit SATA standard was cancelled because its power consumption was considered too high for general use.